


Through the Fire (Shakarian ficlet collection)

by servantofclio



Series: Val Shepard [9]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2018-02-09
Packaged: 2018-11-05 19:03:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 41
Words: 18,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11019627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/servantofclio/pseuds/servantofclio
Summary: Assorted Shepard/Garrus short fics, ranging from fluffy to angsty, mostly in-between.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a repository of short ficlets I've posted to tumblr. Some of them are recent, some of them go back several years. They're going to be wildly out of sequence, but I'm hoping to collect up many of the short fics I've written over the last few years.

Sometimes there is nothing left to say. As they prepare to depart from Menae, Victus and his staff scrambling around packing up necessities and making preparations to leave his command behind, Shepard catches Garrus standing alone, staring at where Palaven burns in the sky. Even if, by some miracle, the Reapers all curled up and died this moment, the destruction they’ve already caused would raze Palaven’s atmosphere and landscape for decades, maybe centuries.   
  
She hesitates before stepping up beside him and putting her hand on his shoulder. She squeezes, even knowing he won’t feel it through his armor.  
  
It’s little enough comfort, with friends and relatives left behind, his homeworld in ruins. They don’t have time for much more, especially not with so many people around.  
  
Garrus glances toward her, mandibles set tight to his jaw, and gives her the barest nod, acknowledging her presence. Taking some comfort from it, she hopes.  
  
In the six months since she’s seen him, the wounds on his face have healed into ridges and whorls of scarred flesh. She wants to feel them with her fingertips. He also ditched his old blasted armor, thank goodness. The set he’s wearing now looks nearly new, heavy and high-quality, a striking silver and blue. She can’t help but notice that the armor sets off his natural coloring and deep blue markings, even in their current straits. She has a hundred questions — about the armor, about this whole “Reaper expert thing” — but now isn’t the time.  
  
They’ll have time later, at least. They can catch up on the Normandy, once Victus and his people are settled. A few hours ago she wasn’t even sure Garrus was alive. She squeezes harder, taking comfort from the hard ceramic plating under her hand.  
  
Looking at Palaven herself, Shepard remembers how Earth looked when she left it, only a couple of days ago: Reapers descending black and spider-like through the gossamer cloud cover, but the planet still blue and green and white, an oasis in the void of space, spangled with the lights of human cities and roads.  
  
She wonders what it looks like now, and how long it will take before it’s as charred as Palaven.  
  
As if he knows what she’s thinking, Garrus puts his hand on her shoulder and squeezes back. She only feels a bit of pressure through her armor, but even that is comforting. Having Garrus at her side, tall and solid, feels right, like shrugging on a favorite set of clothes, like gaining another limb.   
  
Shepard isn’t arrogant enough to think she’s invincible, but with Garrus at her side, she feels a lot closer to it.   
  
Looking to the side, she finds Garrus’s pale-blue gaze on her. She nods, and Garrus tilts his head. Without a word, they turn together and head toward the shuttle.


	2. Whoosh Vanguard Medic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ME2 era. The prompt was "Nurse me"

“You’re _bleeding_ ,” Shepard shouts. “Where is it _coming_ from?”

“Little busy here, Shepard,” Garrus says, sighting through his scope and blowing the head off a Blue Suns merc.

Shepard snarls something into his comm that makes his translator glitch. He spares a moment to wonder just how she knows that he’s bleeding, since he didn’t think she had a line of sight on him. He sights in on another merc and is about to pull the trigger when a blue-hazed blur shoots across his field of vision. Garrus bites back a curse; it’s not the first time. He’s not going to let Shepard’s antics get to him, though, and neatly drills a hole in his target. Then he pops out the heat sink and raises his head to find Shepard diving into cover at his elbow. “Shepard, what—”

“Bleeding. Where?” She demands.

He blinks at her. “What?”

She scowls at him and slathers medigel on his neck, where he’s vaguely aware of having been grazed a few minutes ago. “Shepard, it’s fine,” he hisses.

She growls something, glances around, and shoots off again. A merc’s scream reveals where she’s landed. Garrus sighs in exasperation. She’s been unusually solicitous ever since Omega; it’s obviously because of his injury, and it’s got to stop.


	3. Late-night mining (Kasumi cameo)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ME2 era. Kasumi is a meddling romantic. Prompt was "Amuse me"

“Shep.” Kasumi decloaked, leaning against the CIC workstation. “What are you doing?”

“Mapping out mineral deposits,” Shepard said, intent on the interface.

Kasumi heaved a sigh. “That sounds _so boring_ , Shep.”

Shepard shrugged. “It has to be done. We need a lot of supplies for some of the experimental tech.”

“Well, I do like experimental tech.” Kasumi tilted her head to the side for a better look at Shepard’s tight-lipped profile. “Say, Shep?”

“Yes, Kasumi?” she said without looking up.

“Everything all right?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well…” Kasumi looked around at the otherwise-empty CIC. “You’re up in the middle of the night cycle doing boring mineral mining?”

Shepard’s hands slowed for a moment. “Couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d get something done.”

“Huh.” It wasn’t the first time Kasumi had observed Shepard rattling around the ship at night. She wasn’t sure what Shepard’s demons were—well, she could guess at some of them, but she wasn’t _sure_ —but whatever they were, they kept her up a lot. “But you could be doing anything at all. You need to relax, Shep. Watch a vid. Build one of those model ships or something.”

“I’m out of model kits,” Shepard said and gave Kasumi a narrow-eyed glance. “How did you know about that, anyway.”

Kasumi grinned. “Oh, come on, Shep, it’s _me_.”

Shepard sighed and went back to work. “You could read a book,” Kasumi suggested. “I have some great romance novels you could borrow.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Shepard said. “Kind of in the middle of this right now, though.”

“I’m sure that requires your full attention,” Kasumi said, pushing off from the console and strolling around behind Shepard, smirking to herself as she watched the commander twitch. “Don’t you sometimes go talk to Garrus?”

Shepard paused, the corner of her mouth turning up. “I talk to a lot of people, Kasumi. I’m talking to you right now. I chatted with Mordin a bit ago, but he’s busy at the moment.”

“Mm-hm,” Kasumi said, “but you seem to spend a lot of time with Garrus.”

Shepard smiled again. “We’re old friends. I think he’s asleep now.”

Ah, so that’s why Shepard was reduced to mineral scanning. Sad, really. Shepard’s eyebrows pulled together as she focused on the screen, so Kasumi used her exceptional timing skills and waited for just the right moment to lean in and say to Shepard’s ear, “I bet you could go in and wake him and he wouldn’t mind.”

Shepard jumped with a squawk. “Kasumi! You just made me waste a probe!”

“Probing, hm,” Kasumi said.

Shepard’s cheeks flamed pink. Kasumi counted that a win. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Kasumi leaned back against the console and grinned. “Sure you don’t, Shep.”


	4. Foreign

Human feet really were the weirdest things.

“What do you even have so many toes for?” Garrus asked, loosely gripping one of Shepard’s ankles for a closer look.

She grinned and wriggled her toes, and he tried not to think about grubs or anything unpleasant. “Balance?” she suggested.

“Hmm.” Her toes were short and stubby and had no real grip, but he could imagine that. He ran one finger along them and up the arch of her foot. A curious structure.

Shepard made a sputtering sound. “Stop, that tickles,” she said. “What about you? You’ve only got two.” She reached for his foot. Garrus resisted the urge to yank it away. It was one of those anatomical differences he always felt self-conscious about, one of the places where they differed so much he thought it might be off-putting.

“It would be hard for _me_ to balance with only one,” he pointed out, and let her explore. Two thick toes, claws trimmed, scaled on top, and with heavy callouses on the bottom.

Shepard looked up at him inquiringly. “Not ticklish?”

“Not especially sensitive. Except there,” he amended, as her fingers found their way between his toes.

“Aha, I found one of your soft spots,” she said, but she backed off and squeezed his foot gently. That actually felt kind of nice; he’d spent a lot of time on his feet that day. They sat in silence for a moment; he closed his eyes, idly stroking her calf.

Shepard left off rubbing his feet, her hands wandering up his leg. “What about this?” she asked, tapping his bare spur.

He shrugged. “Mostly vestigial.”

“Mostly?”

“Can still do some damage in a pinch, but you have to fit armor to them individually. Probably more bother than they’re worth.”

“Huh.” She ran her fingers up to the tip. It was a dull sensation, not really sensitive at all, so Garrus didn’t react.

“Hurts like hell if they get cracked, too.”

“I can imagine,” she said, sounding thoughtful. He let his fingers wander up to her knee. Shepard twitched, suppressing a laugh. “That tickles, too.”

“Are you just ticklish everywhere?” Garrus demanded, sitting up so he could see her face properly. It still amazed him sometimes just how different her reactions were, how responsive she was to the lightest of touches.

“Not everywhere,” she said, but squirmed again as he tried another light caress up her leg. “ _Garrus_.”

“I’m not even doing it on purpose,” he said. “How else am I going to find out where you’re ticklish?”

“Well, you could try _firmer pressure_. That usually tickles less.”

“Mm.” He rearranged himself, swinging his legs back and leaning on one elbow, while the other hand tracked a more deliberate path up her thigh and over her hip. Rounder than a turian’s, skin smoother and softer, but still a more familiar curve, and he watched her pupils dilate in a familiar reaction. “How’s that?” he asked in a low voice.

“You’re definitely on the right track.” Her voice had fallen into a lower range, too. Her hand slipped around him and up his side, finding another one of those soft spots she’d mentioned, making him shiver.

Garrus decided it was time to abandon tonight’s exploration in favor of something they both knew worked, and bent down to kiss her. That, he’d gotten the hang of, he thought; at least, her mouth met his eagerly, and the action no longer seemed foreign.


	5. Surprise kiss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-Suicide Mission, pre-Arrival. They're getting more comfortable with each other.

“… and EDI says she’s already gotten dozens of cyberattacks on our systems, probably from Cerberus channels,” Shepard said, pacing back and forth in her quarters. “The Illusive Man just won’t _quit_.”

“Is EDI having any problem with the hacks?” Garrus asked.

“No, she’s got it covered. Look, I knew he wasn’t going to give up quietly, but this is all just _annoying_.”

Garrus rose, crossed to where she stood scowling, put his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her on the forehead. Well. Pressed his mouth there and flicked his tongue lightly against her skin. A week ago he wouldn’t have dared, still adjusting to how humans expressed intimacy, still unsure just how much intimacy they had.

She looked up with rounded eyes, though, and her cheeks were a little pink, and he knew with a surge of satisfaction that the touch wasn’t unwelcome. “What was that for?” Shepard said.

Garrus shrugged. “You can’t do anything about him now. Not more than you’re already doing, anyway. So I thought you might need some distraction.”

Her eyes narrowed as the lids dropped a little, and her mouth stretched out into one of those lopsided half-smiles she seemed to save for him. “Oh, really? You offering yourself up as a distraction?”

“That depends. Is it working?”

“Yeah,” she said, and kissed him back.


	6. Sunset and bullets

It was a pretty sunset, the sun low and red on the horizon, casting ruby light halfway around the dome of the sky, fading out to orange and gold on the edges.

Shame the mercs were coming out of it, so the sun was getting in his eyes. Garrus adjusted the light filtration on his visor, but even that only helped so much. He put his eye to the scope and focused: yes, there it was.

Shepard streaked across his vision in a haze of blue sparks, a shooting star, and he could hear the impact in his ear as she crashed into a knot of mercs. One of them reeled back from her, into his scope, and he pulled the trigger. “One less,” he said to himself.

“What was that?” Shepard called, breathless, and he heard the blast of her shotgun.

“Got one,” he said, already seeking his next target.

She laughed. “Garrus, I got three with that. Nova!”

He scanned away while she built up and discharged the power a detonation at his 1 o’clock, and there, coming up behind her, another merc, until he blew the man’s head off his shoulders. “Got your six, Shepard.”

“You always do,” she said, affection easing through her exhilaration.

“We done with these guys yet?” he asked, scanning the horizon. Motion detector wasn’t picking up anything more.

“I think so,” she said. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

He caught another flicker of blue and realized with a jolt that she was headed straight for him—

And then he hit the ground hard, dropping his rifle, arms full of Shepard. “Ouch,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said, her voice soft and husky, and kissed him, her lips warm and soft and urgent, the sun’s last rays shedding ruddy light over her hair.


	7. Unbind me (Garrus POV)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set between ME2 and ME3.

On Palaven, Garrus occasionally indulges in a little daydream. It involves one of the contingency plans they made when they found out Shepard was going to be incarcerated, one that would require him and Kasumi and Thane to use all their skills to break into Shepard’s prison. In this version, they’re preventing her being handed over to the batarians, so they intercept the transport and disable the Alliance guards and hack their way through several security systems, and then they find her, disheveled and worn but still defiant. He’s the one who unlocks her shackles and takes her into his arms while she’s rubbing her wrists, and she gives him a long, satisfying kiss before they all run for it.

Occasionally the daydream strays into racier territory, but in any version, it beats his everyday life, where he spends part of his days arguing his way through the Hierarchy’s bureaucracy, part strategizing with his father, part mourning his mother, and part arguing with his sister. When the dam finally breaks, everything happens very quickly: he gets his meeting with the Primarch and his task force within ten days, and then there’s hardly time for anything but work, sleep, and the occasional bolted meal.

It comes home to him, a few weeks into the job, that once he wouldn’t have known how to do this; once he would have frozen up or shouted the wrong thing at the wrong time or backed down when he shouldn’t have, something, but instead he just keeps pushing and pressing, working every channel he can to get people to listen, to persuade people to prepare. He’s always been stubborn, and he’s long considered himself a bad turian, but once he wouldn’t have had the nerve to keep pushing his superiors this way.

He supposes that’s one more thing he got from Shepard.


	8. Through the Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early ME3, reunion on Menae.

**Shepard**

She’d been afraid to hope, to tell the truth. She’d deliberately not said anything about the fear that stayed lodged somewhere deep inside her. She didn’t think she’d fooled Liara, or Joker, by the looks they’d been giving her. None of the others knew her well enough. She’d done her best to steady them, and they’d accepted Commander Shepard’s leadership.

But now, for a moment, she felt almost dizzy. It was the wrong time for any real release of tension—of any sort, and she kept a firm grip on the part of her mind that wanted to dissolve into hysterical laughter—the situation was too dire, the mission still in progress, too many onlookers—but she felt shaken nonetheless, as if something had knocked her off her feet and left her ears ringing.

“You’re alive,” she said. Weak. Too weak a greeting for him, but he didn’t seem bothered. She extended her hand, almost automatically. His hand wrapped around it, then, to her surprise, his other. Hard metal armor, but a solid, sure, familiar grip, entirely enveloping her smaller hand.

“I’m hard to kill. You should know that.”

Familiar eyes. Familiar voice, a hint of humor even in their current surroundings. Shepard took a breath, steadied and grounded. The moment of lightheadedness passed.  
Time to find themselves a Primarch.

**Garrus**

He’d been afraid to hope, to tell the truth. Since they’d evacuated to Menae, he’d barely had time to sleep between waves of attackers, let alone think of anything so remote as a lover he hadn’t seen in nearly half a year. Even if it was Shepard. But he’d heard when Earth went dark, and he’d wondered. Was she still trapped in whatever cell they’d put her in? That thought gave him dreams bad enough to wake him from snatched sleep, once. Or was she free, and out in the thick of it somewhere?

Instead, she was here, somehow both unexpected and inevitable. Didn’t she always appear when things were at their bleakest? She stood out among his own people with her bright hair and vivid armor, giving Corinthus a piece of her mind. The sound of her voice made something in him ease.

“I’m on it, Shepard. We’ll find you the Primarch.”

Her demeanor changed when she saw him. Her lips parted, her eyes widened, ever so slightly. “Garrus! You’re alive.”

He took her hand in his—in both of his, half on instinct, feeling the way they fit together, like pieces of a puzzle, like the perfect scope mod on his favorite rifle. As bad as things were, they’d never lost a fight together. They wouldn’t start now.


	9. Cheiloproclitic (lips)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early ME3

Shepard put red paint on her lips every day. 

Garrus had noticed the way her carmine mouth contrasted with her skin, but he hadn’t realized the color was artificial when he first met her. He figured it out after seeing the color rub off as she wiped her sweaty face on Therum, or noticing her lips uncolored when he saw her in passing late at night. 

More recently, he had the opportunity to observe the transformation, or at least the before and after: she would go into the bathroom yawning, tousled, rubbing her eyes, her face all approximately the same color; she emerged with her hair combed and neatly tied up, her eyes clear, and her lips and cheeks a brighter color. The fact that he was the only one who ever saw her that way gave him a deep, obscure sense of satisfaction. She always gave him a smile as he got up to take his own turn in the bathroom, and usually a kiss before they left her quarters and went out to face the world as Commander Shepard and Advisor Vakarian again. A quick one, on his mandible rather than his mouth. 

He’s cataloged her kisses like he’s cataloged her smiles. Some kisses were light, quick, casual; some were long and lingering; some were urgent, crushing out each molecule of air that might lie between them. She had a million different smiles: tight, fixed ones for councilors, journalists, and strangers needing favors; wide, full ones for friends, usually followed by laughter. Her sly, one-sided smiles might be his favorites; Garrus could never get tired of how just the corner of her mouth would quirk up, with her lips still pressed together and her eyes sparkling. Then again, he also particularly liked the ones he sometimes managed to surprise out of her, making the furrow in her forehead disappear, while her mouth relaxed from a tight frown to something softer and gentler. 

To be honest, he couldn’t get enough of her lips, no matter what they were doing. In six months on Palaven, wondering when, if ever, he’d see her again (and whether she’d want anything from him when he did), he’d almost forgotten the variety and vibrancy of her expressions. The surge of relief he felt when he saw her on Menae was quickly swamped by the thrill of seeing her smile. It wasn’t much—she was obviously conscious of the situation, and the turian officers surrounding them—but it was enough to show her own surprise and relief, and that was enough to get his heart pounding. 

A reunion and some difficult negotiations later, Garrus sat through the briefing for their mission to Sur’Kesh, but his mind wandered from the political and tactical situation. Shepard was speaking, her vivid-red lips in constant motion. They stretched, opened and closed, pressed together, curled into a frown, pulled to the side, parting for a glimpse of tongue or blunt white teeth. So flexible, so expressive, he could hardly take his eyes off them, hardly keep from remembering their softness and warmth… 

Shepard pulled him aside once she’d dismissed the rest of the team. “You okay?” 

“Definitely,” he said quickly. “Why?” 

Her teeth pressed into her lip for a moment. “You seemed a little distracted.” 

Garrus tore his gaze away from her mouth, back to her eyes. “No! I, uh. I’ve got the plan down.” That was actually true; he had a thorough grasp on the tactical situation. 

The side of her mouth crooked up in one of those lopsided smiles he loved. While his glance drifted back to the enticing curve of her lip, she surprised him by taking a step closer. Placing a hand on either side of his face, she stretched up the few inches necessary to kiss him. Deliberate and slow, this one, her lips just as warm and soft as he’d been imagining, firm pressure and a brush of her tongue before she stepped back. “I missed you, too,” she said. “I need to suit up. I’ll meet you at the shuttle.” 

She departed, but for a long moment Garrus could still feel the lingering warmth of her lips.


	10. Hidden talent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early ME3.

Shepard’s nowhere in sight when Garrus comes into her quarters—their quarters?—he’s not sure yet. Yeah, she said he should move his stuff in, but she’s still the commander of the ship, and he’s the Hierarchy liaison. Victus has politely not said anything about the fact that he’s taken over the battery and isn’t sleeping with the rest of the Primarch’s staff. Garrus hopes he’ll just continue not saying anything.

He can hear the sound of water running; she must be in the shower. He settles down to wait and realizes he can hear something else, too, a bit of a melody over the noise of the shower. The water shuts off and it gets louder, though muffled and echoey through the bathroom door. He doesn’t recognize the tune, but it’s pleasant. Her voice is pleasant, too, though maybe he’s a biased judge.

Shepard walks out of the bathroom, briskly rubbing a towel over her long hair, still singing. She stops short as soon as she sees him, on a squeak.

Garrus gives her a grin. “Shepard. You sing?”

“No,” she says, too fast.

He tilts his head. “You can tell me.”

“I sing in the shower,” she says, still defensive. “It’s private.”

He gets up and comes over to her, puts his hands on her shoulders, and touches his brow to hers. “It sounded nice.”

She blinks and her expression shifts several times, rapidly. “You’re not going to give me shit for it?”

“Would I do that?”

She glowers. “You do about dancing.”

He touches her cheek. “I won’t about this.”

“Oh,” she says in a small voice, so he wraps her in a hug and runs his fingers through her damp hair.


	11. Basketball

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt was for Garrus and James to cheer Shepard up.
> 
> My Shepard played basketball competitively in high school, so she has Opinions about how things should work.

“What the hell are you people doing in my cargo bay?” Shepard demanded, planting her hands on her hips.

Sparring, she was used to. She hadn’t expected to see a makeshift basket rigged up, or James, Cortez, and Garrus all in workout clothes, the latter looking oddly ruffled.

James gave her a big shit-eating grin. “Just showing Scars here how to shoot some hoops.”

“Really.” Shepard had used to play with Jacob, sometimes, on the last mission. Garrus had never showed the slightest bit of interest. He might have the height, but she wasn’t quite sure turians were built for the requisite jumping and footwork.

“Yeah.” James gave the ball a bounce and then fired off a shot that missed the basket entirely and slammed into the side of the shuttle before Cortez caught it.

Shepard sighed, exasperated. “Vega, your form is terrible. Garrus, whatever he’s been showing you, ignore it. It can’t possibly be a good idea.”

“If you say so, Shepard,” he said dryly.

“I do say,” she said. “Pass me that ball, Steve. Thank you. Okay, gentlemen, this is how it’s done.”

She was so busy demonstrating that she didn’t see the victorious look James and Garrus shared behind her back, or Cortez hiding a snicker.


	12. Am I Interrupting? (guest appearance by Joker)

"Am I... interrupting?" Joker asked, loudly and deliberately.

“Why?” Shepard replied. “Does it look like you’re interrupting?”

“Well, you know, I wouldn’t want you to have to worry about _important ship business_ instead of whatever it is you’re doing with Garrus, which, by the way, I totally did not need to ever know about.”

“Liar,” said Shepard, although she went ahead and slid off Garrus’s lap anyway. “You’re lying on two counts: if it were important ship business, EDI would have already told me, therefore you’re here in your down time, and good for you for getting out of the pilot’s seat, by the way–”

“It’s not the same since the Alliance took the leather off.”

“–and on the second count, you totally wanted to know, I have it on good authority that you were running the betting pool on us during the Collector mission.”

“Geez, Shepard, I didn’t need details,” Joker said, heading over to the bar. “You’re one of the few people on this ship who have decent private quarters anyway, what are you doing here in the lounge? Wait. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”


	13. Tell Me (Shepard makes a confession)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More fics originally posted to tumblr some time ago.

“I made a deal with Aria,” Shepard blurted out.

Garrus looked up from the piece of armor he was working on—he’d hammered out the dents and applied a polymer to shore up the damaged material—and blinked at her. “What?”

It had been eating away at her the whole day, as she dashed around the Citadel doing dirty work for the shitty mercenaries she’d been shooting up only a year ago, the same ones that would probably still kill her boyfriend if they could get their hands on him, the ones he’d dedicated two years of his life to taking down. She figured there was a pretty good chance he wouldn’t forgive her for this, but hell. She wasn’t going to lie to him. Not now. “I made a deal with Aria. She’s on the Citadel, she promised me she’d corral the mercs if I did a few favors.”

His jaw tightened. “Favors? What kind of favors? Nobody comes out ahead in a deal with Aria, Shepard, you should know that.”

“This and that.” She threw herself down on the couch, and sprang up again almost immediately, pacing. “Guns. Shored up some merc leaders.” She bit the inside of her cheek. At least she hadn’t sprung that psychopath Sederis from prison. Or killed Oraka. Nothing unforgivable. Maybe. “They’ve got ships and men, and she promised she’ll point them in the right direction.”

“Until it’s convenient for her to point them in another direction,” he said flatly.

“She won’t… she won’t do that right away.” She didn’t think. “After the war… I figured we’d cross that bridge when we come to it.”

That expression must have translated well enough. Garrus’s mandibles twitched, and he ran a hand over his fringe; she thought she saw the beginnings of acceptance in his expression, and that gave her a guilty kind of hope. “I’m sorry,” she said. “All I could think was that we need every gun we can get aimed at the Reapers. Or Cerberus.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “I get why you did it, Shepard.”

She winced. “But?”

“I’m not going to pretend I’m happy about it.”

She swallowed. “Fair enough.”

He looked up, his gaze stark. “Thanks for telling me.”

“I didn’t feel right keeping it from you.”

When he held out his hand, she took it, and knew they were going to be all right.


	14. Quiet me (Garrus has a temper)

Val Shepard could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d seen Garrus really, truly angry. For all that he had a reputation as a hothead—by turian standards, anyway—in her experience, he was normally calm and even-keeled, more likely to respond to irritation with a sarcastic quip than lashing out. She could think of exceptions—most memorably the whole Sidonis situation—but even then she’d seen his anger as cold and targeted, and abundantly merited, given the circumstances.

So it was a shock to her to hear him tearing a strip off some turian officer who, hell, probably wasn’t more than sixteen, and looked as though he might prefer being scaled by a krogan to the dressing-down Garrus was currently giving him. She’d never seen his propensity for sarcasm be turned into a weapon in quite this way, as he heaped withering contempt on the young officer’s competence. She was probably missing a lot of the subharmonic nuances, too, since the other two or three turians within earshot were stiffening and trying not to look. And it wasn’t really her place to intervene in a matter of Hierarchy discipline, but hell—

“Garrus,” she said, trying desperately not to use her commander voice.

“In a minute, Shepard,” he said calmly, and kept going.

She bit her lip to keep herself from jumping in and undermining him right in front of his subordinates, until he paused for breath at a point that really _could_ be the end of it. Then she put in, “Actually, I really need to speak with you right now.”

His mandibles flicked in and out, and he looked at her with narrowed eyes, but he gave her a nod and followed her out of earshot. As she opened her mouth, though, he held up one hand and said quietly, “I don’t interfere with your discipline of the _Normandy_ ’s crew.”

She winced. “That’s true. You don’t.”

“That officer made mistakes which resulted in twenty people not getting timely medical treatment, and he’s subject to Hierarchy discipline, not Alliance discipline.”

“I understand that,” she said, carefully, evenly, deciding not to remind him that none of the patients involved was his sister. “I just wanted to ask if you really think your response is proportional to the fault.”

He gave her a sharp look through his visor. “I’ve been on the receiving end of worse.”

That made her wince, too, and she wanted to ask whether that was really the kind of commander _he_ wanted to be, but instead she said, “When was the last time you got a full night’s sleep?”

His eyes flickered and after a moment he dropped his head. “Damn,” he said. “All right. You have a point.”

She smiled a little. “Sorry to interrupt, but—I’m not honestly sure you’d let me do that without comment, either. You catch me, I catch you.”

He breathed out a little laugh. “Yeah. Maybe you’re right. Thanks.”


	15. Baby talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A friend asked if they'd ever talked about having kids, and this resulted.

“Did you ever want to have kids?”

Garrus paused, wondering what had prompted Shepard to bring up that subject. A late night, a couple glasses of wine, and somehow the conversation had drifted a long way from the usual routine, toward childhood reminiscences and now to this. “I never really thought about it,” he said cautiously. “I was working, and figured it wasn’t an issue until the right person came along, and then I was on Omega, and… well.” He cleared his throat. “What about you?”

“I never…” She trailed off. “Never had time. Wasn’t sure I’d be a very good mother.” She paused and added in a lower voice, “You’d probably be a good dad, though.”

Garrus was startled, but tried not to show it. “Oh, I don’t know, Shepard,” he drawled. “You did fine with Grunt.”

She snorted and leaned against his shoulder. “I’m not Grunt’s mommy.”

“Sure you’re not.”

She made a face. “He came full grown, Garrus. I don’t know about little kids. Or babies. ”

After a moment, he said cautiously, “There’s always adoption.”

Shepard sat up and refilled their glasses. “I guess that way we could pick ‘em out.”

“We could adopt all kinds of kids,” he said, accepting his glass from her.

“What, turian and human?”

“Krogan kids,” he said without cracking a smile.

Shepard laughed. “I don’t know, I think Wrex is going to be pretty possessive of them.”

“You know he’d make an exception for you. If not, then elcor kids.”

She sputtered. “Those poor kids. God knows what they can smell that we can’t.”

“Hanar kids?”

“Now you’re really reaching,” she said, leaning into his shoulder, but she was smiling again.


	16. What's in a name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Headcanon time: This has the story behind Val's name. I also headcanon that they got married in a quick civil ceremony partway through the war (after the Presidium shooting date). The story of that is in my other fic Life, Letter by Letter, this chapter: http://archiveofourown.org/works/554439/chapters/1087357

“So. Valentina,” said Garrus.

Val sighed. “You noticed that, did you?”

“It was right there on the forms. You don’t think I sign something without reading it, do you?”

She made a noncommittal noise. He added, “I’d just never seen your full name before.”

“My mother was Russian—its an ethnic group on Earth—and she gave us all Russian names, but I never liked it,” she confessed, pushing down the usual twinge of guilt.

Garrus hmmed. “Why not?”

“It was… I don’t know. Too long. Too girly. Too ethnic. It didn’t match how I thought of myself. I liked playing with the boys when I was a kid, lots of roughhousing and climbing trees and falling into the creek, and Val just seemed to fit better. My brothers—” her breath caught, but if she couldn’t say this stuff to Garrus, she’d never say it to anybody “—two of my brothers had Russian nicknames they tried to get rid of, too. Mama called Alexander Sasha, but he preferred Alex, and Mikhail tried to be Mike when he was little, but Misha stuck. And Ivan was just Ivan. Anyway. I didn’t get along very well with my mother, and I didn’t like my name. It’s too bad, too, because I was named after the first human woman in space.”

“Good namesake. That’s a turian sort of thing, naming a child after someone whose achievements are admirable.”

Val nestled a little closer. “Does that mean there’s an admirable Garrus somewhere back in turian history?”

“General, back during the Unification War, I think. It’s a reasonably common name.”

That sounded prosaic enough. “Well, there you are. Now you know the story of my name.”

“It’s too bad you don’t like it,” he said after a little while. “I think it’s pretty. _Valentina_.”

When Garrus said it, it sounded different; the name that she’d disliked throughout her childhood, and that had mostly meant scolding, turned into a thing of seduction, the V vibrating through his dual larynx, the t acquiring a bit of a click, the vowels drawn out and soft. She shivered, leaning back into his chest. His arms tightened around her.

“Well,” she said. “Maybe it would be okay, just between us.”

“Really?” He sounded so delighted and hopeful that she broke into a smile.

“Yeah. Just for you, though. Don’t want to spread it around.”

He nuzzled the back of her neck. “Valentina.”

Maybe it was only his breath on her skin that made her feel warm. Maybe not. She twisted around until she was half facing him. “One more time.”

His forehead pressed against her cheek, and he repeated her name, in a soft, low rumble that made her shiver all over. “Mm,” she said. “Maybe I’m not ready to sleep yet, after all.”


	17. Your first love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also following that quick marriage, and directly responding to Jacob's line in ME3.

“Your first love was always the _Normandy_ ,” Jacob said, with a strange mixture of defiance and sullenness.

What the hell was all that about? Shepard couldn’t stop herself from uttering a short bark of laughter. She glanced over her left shoulder and found Garrus there, as always, arms crossed. He grinned, and she smiled back. “What do you make of that, Garrus?”

“I’m disappointed, Shepard,” he drawled back. “Does that mean you only married me because you couldn’t marry the _Normandy_? Come to think of it, maybe you could have married EDI.”

“Joker would kill me.” She turned back to Jacob and found him staring at her with a slack-jawed expression.

“You two got married?”

“Sure did.” She gave Garrus another smile over her shoulder, and found him moving up to stand beside her. One arm went loosely around her waist, barely perceptible through the armor, carefully finding a space between the weapons mounted to her armor, and he tipped his face against hers, a light nuzzle against her temple.

A strange expression passed over Jacob’s face. Shepard hoped like hell that all she was seeing was disbelief, not revulsion. At her other shoulder, James groaned loudly. “Come on, Lola, Scars, cut that shit out. It’s just weird groundside.”

Garrus laughed and released her, taking a step back. Jacob’s expression smoothed out and he said, “Well. Hey. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Shepard replied, and they got back to business.


	18. Valentine's Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More romantic fluff.

One more useless argument with the asari councilor down. Shepard sighed and made her way to the loft, accepting the datapads Traynor handed her on the way. She’d already done rounds today, hadn’t she? Or was that yesterday? It was getting hard to remember. She scanned through the pads, lists of items they hadn’t been able to restock here on the Citadel, details on the next thing Hackett wanted her to look into, a report from Ann Bryson… She stepped out of the elevator, not looking where she was going, went through the door into her quarters, and stopped dead as she lifted her eyes.

There was a red rose—a single one, just opening—in a thin glass vase on her desk. Next to it was a heart-shaped red box.

“The hell?” Shepard said.

Gingerly, she set down the stack of datapads and opened the box. Sure enough, chocolates. A dozen of them, both milk and dark and— she picked one up and popped it in her mouth— just slightly stale. Still good, the only chocolate she’d had in… how long? She couldn’t remember. She really needed to get more sleep, like Garrus kept telling her.

And where _was_ Garrus, anyway? No need to ask who’d left these things in the cabin; there was only one person with unrestricted access.

Just like that, the door whisked open. “Oh good,” Garrus said. “EDI said you were up here.”

“What’s all this for?” Shepard asked.

Garrus’s browplates twitched, and his mandibles flicked out. “Isn’t it, uh, Valentine’s Day?”

“Is it?” She grabbed the nearest datapad and checked the date. It was, in fact, February 14. She rubbed her temples. Apparently she couldn’t even keep track of the date any more.

“I was told it’s traditional to give your, uh, girlfriend or… wife… gifts, and when I asked around, this seemed like the most traditional…”

“Uh-huh.” She ate another chocolate and stepped toward him, close enough to loop her arms around his neck. “Who did you talk to? Traynor? Gabby? Wait, it was Kasumi, wasn’t it?”

“Uh… yeah. She heard about the wedding and messaged me.”

“How did she even—” Shepard shook her head. Best not to ask what Kasumi’s sources were. “I didn’t get you anything.”

“That’s all right, I wasn’t expecting anything—”

She cut him off with a kiss to his mouth, and then his mandible, and then his throat. “You know,” she murmured, “there are some other things that are traditional for Valentine’s Day.”

“Really.” His voice was dropping into the lower register that made his chest rumble, and he pulled her closer. “I look forward to finding out about these traditions, Valentina.”

She chuckled and kissed him again and reached for the catches on his armor.


	19. Sphallolalia (flirtatious talk that goes nowhere)

_Crack_. The Cerberus trooper’s helmeted head exploded, the body dropping in a slow crumple to the ground. Garrus allowed himself the smallest moment of satisfaction while he sought out his next target.

“Nice one,” came Shepard’s voice over the comm, pitched in a tone reminiscent of certain turian subharmonics.

“You liked that, did you, Shepard?” Garrus asked, setting his sights on a Guardian making his slow way toward Tali’s position.

“Mm-hm. Gotta like the… precision and accuracy.” Shepard flashed across his field of view for a second, a blur of red and blue.

Garrus dispatched the guardian and tracked back to see where Shepard had ended up: she’d rocketed into the middle of a cluster of troopers and centurions. Her arm swung in a vivid arc, and her shields detonated in a haze of blue. Most of the Cerberus soldiers fell as the nova explosion crackled over the comm. Garrus took the opportunity to pick off a centurion who’d stayed on his feet. “Looking good yourself, Shepard.”

She laughed. Her shotgun fired, rhythmic and regular as a heartbeat, as she finished off the remaining troops surrounding her. “Are you flattering me, Garrus?”

“Never, Shepard, you deserve every word of praise,” he said, keeping an eye on her as she whizzed off to another location. He’d gotten past the point where her biotic charges threatened to give him cardiac arrest, and now he could admire her stance as she shifted into the charge, the efficiency with which she sowed chaos and dispatched her opponents…

Vega’s groan echoed over the comm. “Seriously? Can’t you guys give it a rest?”

Tali laughed. “How long have you known them, Lieutenant? They’re always like this.”

“What, flirting in a firefight? I think this is weird even for them, Sparks.”

“You have to give us some slack, James. We’re newlyweds!” Shepard leaped over a low wall—nice form, Garrus observed—and slammed into the nearest trooper.

“How long you gonna milk that excuse, Lola?”

“You’re the one who decided to nickname me and keep things casual, James. You reap what you sow.”

Vega muttered something Garrus didn’t catch. Tali said, “About that, Shepard, I have still not forgiven you for getting married when I couldn’t be there.”

“We did apologize, Tali,” Garrus put in, picking off another guardian headed toward the console where Tali was busy hacking into Cerberus systems. It wasn’t as if they’d even known exactly where Tali was when they’d decided to go ahead and make things official.

“I am never forgiving you, Garrus, just get used to that idea now.”

“Oh, I’m plenty used to you not forgiving me,” he said, glancing back at Shepard’s location. Impossible not to admire her outline out of the corner of his eye as he put a round through the head of a centurion coming up behind her. “Watch your six, Shepard.”

“Thought that’s what you were doing,” she said, her tone light.

Vega groaned again. “This. This is what I’m talking about, Sparks.”

“Seems normal to me,” Tali said, laughing. A moment later her tone changed. “Shepard, Atlas incoming.”

Time to focus, then. Garrus turned his attention toward the sound of the mech’s clanking, heavy steps, making a mental note to pick up the conversation with Shepard later.


	20. Use of a name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See previous chapters' discussion of Shepard's name and their marriage.

It was strange, how much and how little difference it made to be married. They’d exchanged vows, signed forms, taken one night together away from responsibility, and now they were back on the _Normandy_ as if nothing had changed. In most of the ways that counted, nothing had. She charged ahead; he watched her six. She took calls and argued with galactic leaders and ran the crew; he made sure she got a few hours of sleep and enough nutrients that she could keep doing it. The fact that they shared quarters was now official, if still not brandished in the crew’s faces. Between missions, they spent a lot of time side by side on the couch, going over their respective reports, and occasionally strategized together.

Garrus did, however, have a new weapon for his arsenal of _ways to distract Shepard_.

He put down his latest lists of troop movements, stretching his neck from side to side, and said, “Shepard.”

“Mm.”

“Time for a break.”

“Can it wait for a bit? I’m in the middle of this report.”

Garrus rolled his eyes. “What is it?”

“Summary of Bryson’s research on this Reaper killer thing.”

He inched closer and leaned over her shoulder. “Is it really that urgent?”

She didn’t react. Hm. “Can’t be sure. There might be something important in here.”

“Rest is also important,” he said into her ear.

She shivered a little but didn’t put the datapad down. Her free hand was resting on her lap; he took it in his and started gently massaging her write and hand. She sighed a little, without protesting, and didn’t otherwise respond. After a moment, he stopped. “Shepard.”

“Don’t stop, that feels good.”

He gave her a scathing look that she probably didn’t see because she wasn’t looking at him, and leaned closer to her ear. “Valentina.”

 _That_ got her. She looked up, eyes brilliant. Garrus smirked and eased the datapad out of her hand, rubbing circles into each of her palms with his thumbs. “Everything’s tight,” he told her. “Time to relax.”

Her mouth quirked up. “And what about you?” Her hands twisted around and reversed the grip, so that she was rubbing his wrists. “I’m not the one who spends all that time calibrating.”

“Mm.” It did feel good. He let his eyes drift close. Shepard chuckled, taking advantage of the moment to slide into his lap, a warm armful of human. He wrapped his arms around her and she draped her arms over his shoulders.

“You use that weapon shamelessly,” she said.

He grinned at her. “I know.”

“It’s a good thing I like you, or I wouldn’t let you get away with that.”

He nuzzled the side of her neck and smiled when she sighed. “I know,” he whispered, tightening his hold, as always, thankful to every power that might be that she was here and whole and willing to be with him.


	21. Game night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shepard and Garrus play board games. It doesn't go well.

“So let me get this straight,” Garrus said. “The object of the game is to accumulate property and raise rents until you bankrupt all the other players?”

“That’s right,” Shepard replied. “What’s the problem?” she added, observing the look on Garrus’s face.

“Well, where are all the people supposed to live?” Garrus asked. “Do they get a housing assignment with their service, or what?”

“Do they— look, that’s not the point,” Shepard said. “The point is to make the most money.”

Garrus’s mandibles pressed in toward his jaw. “I don’t know, Shepard.”

Her eyes narrowed. “No wonder you turians needed the volus to run your banks.”

“Hey!” Garrus protested. “It’s not that, it’s just, that’s exactly how things worked on Omega, you know. Well. Minus the gangs and the eezo mining. But you would not believe the housing contracts most people were forced into.”

Shepard sighed. “’Monopoly’ is just a game, though, Garrus. Okay, fine, we’ll play something else. I think you’ll like this one, it’s more of a strategy game. I used to play it with my brothers.”

An hour later, Shepard was grinding her teeth as Garrus’s giant army swarmed toward her last bastion in Australia. Playing Risk! against a battle-trained turian tactician turned out to be quite a different proposition than playing against three younger brothers when all four of them were kids.

To add insult to injury, he said, “I don’t know, Shepard. It doesn’t seem all that strategic to me.”

“What makes you say that?” she said through her teeth, pushing the button to roll the dice.

“There’s too much luck involved,” he said. “It really comes down to who gets the bonus armies the fastest. Speaking of which—”

“ _Do not tell me you have another set of cards_ ,” Shepard hissed.

Garrus smirked. It was only the tiniest flicker of his mandible, but she knew it was a smirk, damn him. “You’re seriously outnumbered now, Shepard. Do you want to concede?”

“No,” she snapped. “I suppose you’re going to claim that turian games are much better.”

“Well, more strategic, anyway. More interesting. But, you know, you’d be a beginner, so you wouldn’t have much of a chance—”

Shepard’s eyes narrowed. “You’re on.”

It only took forty minutes (twenty of which had been rules explanation) for her to want to curse turians and their three-dimensional game board and their “pure strategy” game. She was on the defensive, had only the faintest idea what she was doing, and had only one weapon left in her arsenal. “Wow,” she said, loosening her collar. “Is it getting hot in here?”

“Feels fine to me,” Garrus said absent-mindedly, staring at the holographic board as if it were the most fascinating thing in the room. “You know, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy this game.”

#

“How was game night, Commander?” Samantha Traynor asked brightly the next morning.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Shepard said. “Next time we’re sticking to video games.”


	22. Wanna dance?

“Wanna dance?” Shepard shouts over the noise of the club. 

Even in the middle of a war, Garrus thinks, noting the flashing lights and wildly gyrating bodies, and then amends the thought: _especially_ in a war. People need some stress release, and all the action in the club has a certain frenetic edge.

Shepard, for example, is flushed, and has hair falling loose out of its knot. She’s still swaying to the pounding beat, and flashes him a smile that’s wry and lopsided and completely dazzling. 

“You know I’m not much of a dancer,” he says, leaning closer to her ear to be heard.

She snorts and brushes hair out of her face. “Neither am I, or so everyone keeps telling me. C’mon.”

He could hardly say no to that smile and her outstretched hand, so he follows her onto the dance floor for a bit of awkward shuffling around. Someday, he resolves, someday he’ll show her a real dance.


	23. Helping hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shepard needs a little help after a minor injury.

Shepard was lucky. She knew that. For a million reasons, but most recently because she’d actually gone face to face with a Reaper and lived to tell the tale. In fact, she’d walked away with nothing more than some easily treated burns, a couple of minor fractures that the bone weaves were already setting, and a wrenched shoulder.

The knowledge that she was lucky didn’t make her any happier about the fact that she couldn’t comfortably raise her arm above shoulder level, though. All she wanted was to take a damned shower, and instead here she was in her cabin with her undershirt tangled around her face and an excruciating pain in her right shoulder.

Shepard cursed until her eyes stopped watering and then carefully extracted herself, using her left arm to lever the fabric over her head and off, and while she was there, yanked out her hairpins and let the long coil of hair down.

“Commander,” said EDI, “would you like me to inform Dr. Chakwas of your current symptoms?”

“No,” Shepard said shortly, grabbing two painkiller tablets out of the stash in the bathroom and washing them down with half a glass of water. It was the same damned shoulder as always. The one she’d dislocated back at the Battle of the Citadel, the one she’d wrenched again leaping onto the Normandy from the Collector Base, the one that took the brunt of her shotgun’s recoil. Chakwas had been on her about resting that shoulder over and over again. Taking a breath, she added more calmly, “It’s okay, EDI. A hot shower and some rest, and it’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“I see,” said EDI, and if the AI sounded ever-so-faintly skeptical, Shepard nonetheless chose to ignore it.

The problem was, once she got into the shower, the hot water didn’t work its usual magic. Her shoulder loosened up a little, but still not enough to lift it comfortably, no matter how long she let the spray wash over the sore muscles and ligaments.

She didn’t even realize Garrus had entered the cabin until the bathroom door slid open, and she heard him say, “Shepard, is there a reason you’re trying to wash your hair one-handed?”

“Shoulder,” she said through her teeth.

“Ah,” he said. Smart man, not requiring any further explanation. She turned her back to the door, continuing her awkward one-armed attempt to wash her hair, ignoring the rustle of fabric behind her.

“Need some help?” Garrus asked. Shepard hesitated before nodding once, and then let her arms fall as Garrus took over, six fingers gently rubbing the shampoo through her hair ans massaging her scalp. She sighed and found tension easing out of her neck and shoulders that she hadn’t realized was there.

They’d showered together before—more for fun than functionality. Today there was something blissfully peaceful about not having to care for herself any more. She could just stand under the hot water and let Garrus take care of it. “I am so tired,” Shepard mumbled as he finished rinsing out her hair and turned the water off.

He chuckled. “You ended a centuries-old conflict and destroyed a Reaper today, Shepard. I think you can take a nap.”

He sounded a little too easy with everything, so Shepard stole a look at him as she wrapped herself up in a towel. “You okay?” she asked, and then shook her head. “Dumb question. Sorry. Sorry about the whole, um, Reaper thing, too.”

Garrus’s laugh sounded worn around the edges. “I should have gotten used to you taking extreme risks by now.”

“Still,” she said.

“Still,” he echoed, and leaned down, resting his forehead against hers.

She sighed, closing her eyes at the familiar, reassuring pressure. “Hey,” she said, eyes still closed. “I don’t suppose you could dry off my hair, too?”

He chuckled again, and a moment later he’d moved away, running a second towel over her hair. “Never satisfied,” he said with a melodramatic sigh.

“I have a bum shoulder,” Shepard pointed out.

“Do this, do that,” he said, and continued in that vein while he gently squeezed the damp out of her hair, until Shepard couldn’t help but laugh. “Now what?” he asked. “Do you want to sleep on it damp?”

“As nice as a nap sounds, I have at least an hour of correspondence to wade through and then a call with the Council,” she said, and bit her lip. “Normally, I’d put it up again, but I guess I can leave it down.” It felt unprofessional to leave her hair loose, but maybe she could just pull it back.

“No, I’ve got this,” Garrus said.

Shepard raised her eyebrows at that, but at worst she could just yank it down again, so she shrugged. “Go ahead.”

She expected Garrus to run his fingers through her hair, which he did. She even expected him to linger, slightly, combing his hands through the damp strands. She didn’t expect him to start twisting her hair back into its knot with such ease, coiling it up and grabbing a couple of hairpins from her desk to secure it. He stepped back and cocked his head to the side, looking at his handiwork critically, and then nodded once. Shepard stood and stepped into the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror. The knot looked almost as though she’d made it herself. She touched it with her good hand to make sure it was secure. “Not bad, Vakarian,” she said in some surprise.

He folded his arms. “Did you doubt me, Shepard?”

“You’ve got more practice taking it down than putting it up,” she pointed out.

His left mandible tipped out into a smirk. “You think I wasn’t paying attention?”

“I know better than that,” she said with a smile. “Still, you could think about taking up hairdressing.”

“Riiight,” he said. “Expert Reaper Advisor, liaison to the Alliance, and hairdresser. That’d be something.”

“After the war,” she suggested.

“Tell you what, I’ll consider it,” he said.

Shepard smiled wider, and fonder, and went over to press a kiss to his mandible. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Any time,” he replied, his voice warm and low.


	24. Zip me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set mid-Citadel mission.

“Shepard, are you ready?” He and Brooks are ready to leave to the casino, but Shepard hasn’t made her appearance yet, so Garrus heads up the stairs to find her.

“Almost,” she calls from the bedroom, then adds, “actually, could you come in here and give me a hand?”

Any number of responses flit through his head, but they’re on a mission, so he swallows them down. He comes into the bedroom and finds her squirming, a long pale swath of skin visible through the opening on the back of her dress. “I can’t quite reach the zipper,” she says. “Must have wrenched something when I fell through the stupid fish tank.”

Garrus frowns. “You’re sure you’re up for this, Shepard?” He casts a critical eye, but there are no visible injuries on what he can see of her. Anyone else would have had their skin shredded, which makes him grateful for all those skin weaves.

“This isn’t a combat mission. We’re just going to play nice with the idle rich and then ask whatsisname some questions.”

“Khan,” he reminds her, reaching for the zipper.

“Right, Khan.”

The zipper tab is tiny in his fingers. Shepard lets out a breath as he pulls the tab up, watching the tiny teeth close up the black fabric, obscuring her skin. The dress is sleek and form-fitting and he’d much rather be taking her out of it than putting her in it. No helping that, he supposes. He gets the tab to the top and lets his hand linger on her neck. “The shoulder’s not bothering you?”

“Not more than usual,” she says, which isn’t any damned kind of answer at all, but she turns around and raises an eyebrow. “Ready for this?”

She looks good. She always looks good, but he steps back for a properly appreciative glance, and she smiles in response. “I’m always ready,” he says. “Let’s give the people a show.”


	25. Feathers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think the prompt here was for some kind of ultimate fluffiness, and I went literal.

Anderson’s apartment was not only cavernously large and situated in one of the most vibrant districts of the Citadel, it was also expensively furnished. Shepard did not fully appreciate this fact at first. Oh, she could tell that the couches were leather and the vidscreens and work terminal were top-of-the-line and even the kitchen appliances seemed expensive. But she didn’t really care until she tried stretching out on the bed in the master bedroom—or what she took to be the master bedroom, anyway, the one with the attached bath AND the biggest closet—and discovered it was a feather bed.

“My God,” she said, closing her eyes.

It felt like lying on a cloud. A fat, puffy, white cloud that was the only thing drifting in an otherwise sunny sky. She sank into it, and the luxurious featheriness of the bed and pillows molded themselves gently around her. She’d thought the Cerberus-provided bed on the _Normandy_ was comfortable, but she’d had _no idea_. It might even be _too_ soft.

She rejected that thought almost immediately. She hadn’t even known this sort of thing existed, and now that she did, she could surely indulge herself, at least for a few nights. The sheets were super-soft and smooth, too. They were probably some thread count higher than she actually _could_ count. She was tempted to throw off all her clothes so she could roll around and feel the silky smoothness against her skin.

She could think of more than one reason to throw off her clothes, too. She opened her eyes. Garrus stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed, giving her one of those indulgent looks. One of the ones that said _you_ _’re ridiculous and adorable_ , or at least that’s what she hoped it said. “This,” she announced, “is my favorite bed on the Citadel.”

A browplate twitched. “You haven’t even slept in it yet, Shepard.”

“Doesn’t matter. I already know it’s going to be good.” She stretched her arms over her head and wriggled into the feathers. “Want to come down here and try it out with me?”

He winced. “I hate to say no, but I’m supposed to check in with the turian councilor, and then C-Sec, and then—”

“I get it.” She might be disappointed, but she’d behave herself and not haul him away from his other responsibilities. She summoned up a smile. “Give the councilor my love!”

Garrus snorted. “Right. Is that the kind of love that comes with a punch? If so, I’ll decline to pass that on.”

Shepard grinned and extended an arm. “Help me up?”

He took her hand wordlessly, long fingers wrapping around her wrist, and pulled her up with one of those effortless motions that left her a little breathless.

#

As things turned out, they didn’t get to break in the bed as soon as she’d hoped. She got Joker’s message asking her out for lunch not long after Garrus left, and that launched them into a mess that left her with barely enough time to sleep between missions over the next few days. When all was said and done, when she’d finally submitted the last reports to the Alliance and C-Sec and the Council explaining just what had happened, she stumbled up the stairs, stripped down to her undershirt, and fell into bed without ever turning the light on.

Ahhhh. It really was glorious. The sheets were just as silky-smooth as she’d imagined, and the bed as a whole practically wrapped her up in a soft feathery embrace. Too bad she wouldn’t be conscious long to enjoy it. The only thing better would be—

“Room for one more?”

“Always,” she mumbled, forming the word with some effort. The bed sank and shifted under new weight. Shepard rolled toward the middle, meeting Garrus there, tucking herself his warmth, against angles and ridges that had come to feel familiar and comforting. “Mm. That’s it. Told you. Favorite bed.”

He chuckled, and she fell asleep almost on the instant, with the rumble of laughter vibrating through the bed.

Shepard woke when something tickled her nose.

She twitched her nose in response, rousing gradually to wakefulness, enough to open her eyes. A feather, small, whitish-grey, fuzzy edged, drifted in front of her eyes. She sneezed when it brushed her nose again. The expulsion of air stirred up more of them, a handful of feathers caught on the eddies of air, as if chasing each other. “What?” she said.

“Huh?” Garrus said, sounding more asleep than awake. He started to heave himself over to face her, and a fresh cloud of feathers erupted from somewhere behind him. Shepard watched them spray in the air and drift down on top of them, and a suspicion blossomed in her mind.

“Garrus, hold still, I think you’ve—”

“What?” He finished rolling over, accompanied by a tearing sound and an even larger mass of feathers that shot into the air before settling down on to the bed.

Shepard burst out laughing. “I think you’ve torn the pillow case,” she managed to squeeze out before completely dissolving into giggles.

Garrus lay back on the mostly-deflated pillow and glared. Hard. He huffed out a breath. The drifting feathers swirled into the air again, and Shepard laughed even harder. “Oh, God, the look on your face.”

“This is not my favorite bed on the Citadel.”

“Where’s my omni-tool? I need a picture.”

“Don’t you dare.”

Shepard flopped onto her back, still laughing, stirring the layer of feathers that had settled on the bed. “Garrus Vakarian, Archangel, hunter of Saren, slayer of Reapers—”

“Shepard.”

“—meets his match in a _feather pillow_.”

“These sheets are obviously defective.” It was his turn to sneeze, further disturbing the feathers.

“Here, let me—”

Garrus grumbled in annoyance, but let her reach out and detach the pillowcase from his mandible. There might have been a worn spot where it had torn, but she couldn’t be sure. There was a giant rip in it now, and to judge from the volume of feathers surrounding them, it had been slowly leaking for the last several hours. “Poor pillow case,” Shepard said. “It didn’t have a chance against all those pointy bits.”

Garrus growled and pounced, the fluffy mass of the bed shifting under them as Shepard laughed and squirmed, feathers swirling into the air. “Never mention this to anyone,” he said, leaning over her, trying to look stern. It might be more threatening if she couldn’t hear the barely suppressed laughter in his voice.

Or if he didn’t have feathers stuck in the grooves of his crest and drifting around him. Shepard swallowed another burst of laughter. “You owe me a new set of sheets,” she said, watching his expression change as she shifted.

“Done,” he said, and bent to kiss her.


	26. Slow kiss

The morning after the party, Shepard wakes slowly. There’s a dull throbbing in her head, and her legs ache like she’s been dancing.

She stretches out her legs in the too-soft bed, cracks her eyes open, and shuts them again when the light slanting in from the window stings her eyes. It takes her a moment to remember where she is. Right. The apartment. Anderson’s apartment. She won’t call it hers. That explains the bed.

The turian with one wiry arm slung over her, now that’s familiar.

Garrus makes an affectionate drunk, it turns out. Very affectionate. Once she distracted him from booby-trapping her apartment, he was only too happy to demonstrate his feelings in other ways, and now he’s sprawled out beside her, breath whistling slightly through his teeth, practically snuggling. They’re both still naked, tangled in the sheets.

She smiles as she stretches again, her legs sliding against the smooth sheets, and thinks of last night’s activities. It’s still shore leave. She’s got nothing to do today, nothing at all except maybe bug the Alliance about when the Normandy’s retrofit will be done, and that’ll keep.

She twists and kisses Garrus on the mandible. He makes a humming noise, half buried in the pillow.

“Garrus,” she says in a low voice.

He makes another noise, somewhere between a groan and a wheeze, and turns her head, barely cracking one eye open. Shepard smiles sweetly at him, victorious. “Good morning.”

He blinks at her. After a moment, he says, “Shepard, I don’t know about you, but this morning is not currently a good one.”

“No?” Shepard wiggles a little closer and strokes his neck.

Garrus blinks at her again. His eyes seem to be focusing, finally. “Well.”

“Well?”

“I might be prepared to be convinced,” he allows.

She runs a finger along the edge of his mandible. “We don’t have anywhere to be today.”

“Hmmm. I like the sound of that.”

She tries to remember the last time that was true. She’s not sure it’s ever been true, to be honest. “Me too. Actually, I’m kind of afraid to try to go anywhere, since someone was trapping my apartment last night.”

Garrus freezes. “… that was Zaeed’s fault.”

“Uh-huh. I HEART GARRUS, was that the code?”

He groans and shuts his eyes.

Shepard laughs and kisses him, nice and slow. He relaxes into it right away, tongues moving languidly. Shepard soaks in each sensation: the taste of his mouth, the slight roughness of his skin against hers, the softness of the bed, the quiet. For once, they have time.

Maybe today, they can spend the day in.


	27. Flowers

“I’m not really a flowers kind of girl,” Shepard had said once. Garrus couldn’t remember why; maybe in response to something Kasumi had said.

“What do you mean?” Kasumi had said. “You don’t have a favorite?”

Shepard had shrugged. “I mean, flowers are pretty enough, but I wouldn’t say I have a favorite, and I don’t really get all the symbolism and traditions and that stuff.”

The conversation moved on to other topics, but somehow it stuck in Garrus’s mind.

Where he’d grown up, around Cipritine, the rainy season was cold (by turian standards, not human ones) and windy. It rained every day for a couple of months, turning everything to mud, and as the rain eased off, the first flowers that bloomed would be everywhere, hardy and tenacious, taking root between cracks in the wall or silt along the walkways. Clusters of scarlet petals gathered around golden centers, brilliant contrast to the mud and gloom. Shepard had always made him think of those flowers, somehow, he wasn’t sure why.

He was passing by a shop on the Citadel when a display of the flowers caught his eye. The price was ridiculous for a common wildflower, he thought... but then he remembered that all of Cipritine was a blazing pyre, if not a battleground still, and paid without objection.

By the time he got to Shepard’s new apartment, Garrus was having second thoughts about the impulse purchase. She’d probably think it was silly; she’d even said she wasn’t really into flowers. But there he was anyway, at her door, with the pot of flowers in his hands, and there was no point in wasting it, was there?

He let himself in, called out a greeting and got a muffled response, and looked around for someplace suitable to set the pot down. He was still looking for the right place when Shepard came down the stairs, rubbing her damp hair with a towel. “Hey,” she said. Her eyebrows rose as she saw his burden. “What’s that for?”

“I- er- I used to see these all the time, growing up. Spotted them in a window and they made me think of you. Besides, I figured you needed something around to brighten up the place.” A weak justification, maybe; the apartment was fully decorated already, but he wasn’t sure it was her taste. Did he even know what her taste was, really?

She draped the towel over her shoulder and reached out to take the pot, cupping it in both her hands. She lifted it up to her face and inhaled, then looked at him with one of the most peaceful smiles he’d ever seen on her. “They’re beautiful. Thank you.”

Her smile set him at ease as he watched the light play on her bright hair. She was always the most vivid thing in any room she was in. Probably why the flowers brought her to mind.


	28. Enamor me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sort of sequel to the Citadel date, turning the tables on the "first meeting" scenario.

“Come here often?”

Garrus had been wondering how Shepard wanted to play this one. He was surprised it was such a basic opener, though. “No,” he replied amiably. “I’m just passing through.”

“Oh, maybe I could show you around, then. And buy you a drink.” She leaned herself against the bar, deliberately cocking one hip out, emphasizing the curve of her waist. He noticed, but he wasn’t going to show her he noticed. This scenario was her idea; he’d make her work for it a bit.

“Already have one,” he said, indicating the nearly-full glass. “And I’m leaving in the morning. No time for a tour, I’m afraid.”

She tilted her head, raising an eyebrow, and then gave him one of her sultriest smiles. “Not even just a tour for a night? That’s such a shame.”

“Is it,” he said, now thoroughly distracted by the subtle… shifting… thing she was doing with her hips and legs.

Her smile widened. “Mm-hm. I mean, you have a very impressive fringe, sir, and I’ve… heard things about turian fringes and… other bits of anatomy. I was wondering if they were true.”

Garrus snorted. “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear, human.”

“Shouldn’t I?” She leaned in close enough that he could feel her breath. “That would be _very_ disappointing. And with such a… fine supportive waist, too.”

He sputtered as he swallowed his drink and leaned toward her. Shepard’s smile grew, no doubt confident of her victory, but he said into her ear: “You’re mixing up your compliments, Shepard. _Supportive_ is for turian women.”

Her eyes went wide and then half-closed so she looked at him through her eyelashes. “Oh, and I thought I was doing so well, too. How’s a girl supposed to get a little interspecies action? Won’t you cut a poor human a break?”

“Pity? You’re going with pity? That’s not much like turian-style flirting, Shepard.”

“No? Then how’s this?” Her smile turned dangerous. Oh, she was so certain of her victory. She leaned close enough that her chest pressed against his arm and whispered, “I reserved a sparring room at the gym on the next block.”

His turn for widening eyes. Garrus coughed. “You win.”

“Don’t surrender just yet,” she murmured as he paid for his drinks.


	29. Malapert

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Malapert: clever in manners of speech; impudently bold in speech or manner; saucy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They do a lot of role-playing, imo.

The Spectre leaned back in her chair, one leg crossed over the other, her arm resting on the back of her chair, the picture of casual ease. She gave him a lazy half-smile. “Officer. What can I do for you?” 

“Detective,” Garrus corrected, in a tone just a little too sharp to be strictly polite. Human hearing being what it was, there was a good chance she wouldn’t know that. 

Her smile widened, though, and he had a moment of doubt. She might be better at turian subharmonics than he’d bargained for. She tipped her chin up. “Detective, then. Is there something you need?” 

There wasn’t a chair handy for him, of course, so he had to stand in front of her like a petitioner. Spectres. “Your name came up in connection with a case I’m investigating, so I’d like to ask you a few questions.” 

“Ah.” She glanced to the side, seemingly inspecting her fingernails. “I’m afraid that’s classified.” 

Garrus stared at her. “I haven’t even told you which case it is.” 

“Doesn’t matter.” She looked back at him with that damned smirk and put both hands behind her head. “All my cases are classified, and I’m not obligated to tell you a thing.” 

“You’re obstructing justice,” he said, not bothering to mask his disbelief or his anger. 

“I’m a Spectre.” Her shoulders moved up and down. 

“Then you should care about seeing justice done,” he snapped. 

Her eyebrows went up. “Detective? Are you giving me attitude?” 

“Attitude?” Garrus crossed his arms and took a step toward her, so she had to tilt her head back to look up at him. If she was going to make him stand, he might as well take advantage. “I’m investigating a crime. You’re preventing me from doing my job and obstructing justice. I think I’ll talk to you however I please.” 

Her lips pressed together, as if she were trying to hold in laughter. “You know this is a Council Spectre you’re talking to?” 

“Is that supposed to be a threat?” he countered, staring her down. 

Her eyebrows arched and then lowered. “You don’t think so?” 

“It could be,” he said. “You could dispose of me if you wanted, and use Spectre authority to cover it up.” He ignored her muttering “ _bold_ ” under her breath. “I don’t think that’s your style, though.” 

“Interesting.” She lowered her arms, resting her elbows against the arms of the chair. Her fingers laced together over her midsection, drawing his attention to the way her shirt had pulled loose from her waistband. “What makes you think you know me, Detective?” 

Garrus took a step closer. “Oh, I know your reputation, Spectre. You get the job done, and it’s dangerous to be in your way, but you’re not one to trample on the innocent. You’d rather help them if you can. And you’re not corrupt. Not like some Spectres.” 

Her tongue darted out and traced over her lips, distracting him. “That’s my reputation, is it?” 

“It is.” He leaned forward the barest amount, forcing her to tilt her head even further back. “Which leads to the question of why you’re obstructing justice now.” 

She stared up at him for a long moment, her human eyes, fringed with those little hairs, especially wide and bright. “Maybe I’m messing with you.” 

Garrus clicked his mandibles. “Rude. Very improper, Spectre.” 

She uncrossed her legs and hooked an ankle around his thigh before he could dodge, pulling him toward her chair. He caught himself, bracing his hands on the arms of the chair, nearly tangled with hers. Shepard was laughing hard enough to give him a certain warm thrill of satisfaction. “Smooth,” she said. “You always talk to recalcitrant Spectres that way, Detective?” 

“Only when it’s warranted,” he said, his voice dropping into the lower register that usually got her attention. 

True to form, her eyes widened, and he was close enough to feel her breath catch. “Well, Detective, you’re making a persuasive case that I should hear you out. In private, maybe.” 

He drew back a little to look into her face and grinned. “Well, you’re prettier than the last Spectre who asked, so sure.” 

She smiled, victorious, and then her expression abruptly changed. “The last Spectre…? Garrus, what are you talking about?” 

“All part of the game, Shepard,” he said, bending to nuzzle the side of her neck. 

She let out a tiny gasp, her arms rising to surround him, but she said, “But you weren’t serious, right? You never—” 

Chuckling, Garrus cut her off with a kiss.


	30. Mardi Gras kiss

“I don’t think I understand this holiday,” Garrus calls over the roar of the music.

“Mardi Gras? I think it used to be religious.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

The club is a cacophony of people in garish clothing, half of them wearing strands of gaudy, cheap-looking beads, all of them drunk. Shepard is wearing a mask covered in purple and green sequins and framed with feathers. She grins. “Nope, but I think now it’s mostly an excuse to drink and have a party.”

“Humans have a lot of those,” he notes.

“Yep,” she shouts back.

She’s wearing a green dress, too, which is short and tight and shows off her shoulders and collarbones and a hell of a lot of leg. “You’re doing that thing with your arms again,” he calls, partly to distract himself from what the rest of her is doing.

She scowls, the curl of her lip exaggerated by the dark purple lipstick she’s wearing. “I don’t have to put up with you and your insults of my dancing, mister.” She turns her back on him to illustrate.

He takes one step, wraps his arms around her, and peppers kisses along her neck and shoulder, feather-light brushes. She shrieks and wriggles. “Garrus, that tickles!”

“What a shame,” he says into her ear and licks her earlobe.

When she turns around to kiss him back, her mask knocks him in the face. He winds up with sequins stuck between his plates, but it’s worth it.


	31. Worries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set after the Leviathan mission. The "recent acquisition" mentioned is the husk head.

When the door to her quarters slid open, she said, “I’m really fine,” without looking up from the terminal. She did feel fine, the headache completely gone, although Chakwas had given her every neural scan they could manage and instructed her to rest. As usual, she was defying medical orders by answering her mail.  
  
There was a pause, the doors sliding shut, and she heard the faint scrape of footsteps. “Uh huh,” said Garrus. “Seems like I’ve heard that before.”  
  
She swiveled her chair around, to see him regarding her recent acquisition warily. “I can’t believe you actually brought that thing on board,” he said.  
  
She smiled and shrugged. “Consider it a souvenir.”  
  
“Hope it doesn’t bite too hard.”  
  
She thought of Leviathan, and her smile fell away. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Me too.”  
  
Garrus did not comment on her changed mood, but simply came close and put his hand on her shoulder. She was grateful; it was hard enough for her to stop second-guessing her own decisions without listening to someone else’s doubts. She owed him for more than that, too. “Thank you,” she said, looking up.  
  
His face shifted into an expression of honest puzzlement. “What for?”  
  
“You pulled me out of fire when I was in no condition to fight?” Truth was, she’d barely been able to walk. Her memory of everything after the Leviathan was a little hazy, actually. Afterward, she’d watched the action from the camera feeds that everyone, plus the Kodiak, carried.  
  
“Oh.” Garrus stepped back and rubbed the side of his neck. “I... always, Shepard. You don’t need to thank me for that.”  
  
She tried to decide whether she was seeing a turian-duty thing or a protective-boyfriend thing, and gave up. She stood and closed the distance between them, looping her arms around him. “Are you all right?” They’d held out for hours, she knew, and she hadn’t missed how shaky his cam was as he rushed to her prone form.  
  
“Yeah, I’m...” He averted his eyes, looking somewhere over her shoulder, and the scarred mandible twitched. “All right, I was worried about you.”  
  
She nodded, remembering the look on his face as she’d climbed into the diving mech. “I have to admit I was a little worried myself. I didn’t like leaving you and James and Steve behind. But if I didn’t, we might have been stuck there forever.”  
  
“I know that. It was... all that water, Shepard.” He fidgeted, tensing in her hold. “I can’t...” His eyes finally returned to hers, and there was something stark there. “I hate not being able to follow you.”  
  
She hugged him tighter and he returned the embrace, a little harder than usual. She said, “I’m sorry. I know you told me never to do that again, but...”  
  
His laugh was a little weak, but it ruffled her hair. “I know I can’t really ask you to... well. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t take impossible risks.”  
  
“I’ll try to space them out. Wouldn’t want to worry you too much.”  
  
Her reward was a more genuine laugh. She leaned into him, letting her fingers play along his neck. Part of her wanted to make promises, that she’d always come back, that she’d never go solo again. She stopped herself. They both knew what risks they lives held. She wasn’t about to start lying to him now.


	32. Forceful kiss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somewhere during ME3.

Shepard has had her fill of the Council and the Alliance both. Get us the krogan, they said, and now the asari councilor won’t return her calls and the salarian councilor is fussing about her “inappropriate landing" on Sur’Kesh, and even the turian councilor is mumbling about curing the genophage being ill-advised, but at least he’s Victus’ problem to deal with.

Her temper is fraying and she has a headache and she really wants to pound something into the wall.

If the first person she’d run into at the airlock were James, she probably would have pounded him into the wall. A nice “dance," as he called it, just the thing.

But the person she finds there is Garrus, also returning to the Normandy. He doesn’t even have a chance to call out a greeting before she grabs the collar of his armor and shoves him up against the bulkhead. Her kiss is all hard and relentless, nearly bruising her lips against his mouth, pushing her tongue against him until he opens up and she pushes further. She scrapes her tongue against one of his teeth and tastes blood, but she doesn’t particularly care. He’s not passive, though; he pushes back, grips the back of her head, slides his tongue past hers and between her lips.

"What was that for?" he asks when she breaks for breath. He sounds gravelly and breathless all at once.

"I really need," she breathes, “to blow off some steam."

Something shifts in his eyes, and he holds her gaze as he reaches for the airlock controls.


	33. Upside-down kiss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Take your pick of when. One of several kissing prompts.

Shepard walked into the battery and stopped short when Garrus was nowhere to be seen. Not at the console, not reviewing Hierarchy reports, not working on his rifle. But she was sure EDI had indicated he was here. “Garrus?"

"Shepard?" His voice was muffled. “Need something? Just give me a second…"

She followed the sound and found him wedged at an awkward angle between weapons systems and conduits. “What are you even doing in there?"

"I needed to adjust the power coupling on the…" He looked up at her, upside down from her point of view, blinking. He was oddly ruffled-looking, and had a streak of grease on one cheek. “You don’t actually care, do you?"

She bent over and put one hand on either side of his face. His mandibles twitched against her palms. She kissed his forehead, above each eye, and finally his nose, which flexed slightly under her lips. “Nope," she admitted. “You going to be able to get out of there? Not going to get stuck?"

Garrus blinked once more. “Uh. No. I’ll be out in a few."

"Then I’ll wait," she said, and sat back on her heels with a smile.


	34. Running

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In her dreams, she ran.

In her dreams, she ran.

She was back at home, running on the road that looped the experimental fields, full of samples her dad’s team were trying to adapt to Mindoir’s soil. It was her favorite run, especially early in the morning, when she needed to get out of a house that was too small and too full and too squabbly. She ran along the packed-earth, sweat already dripping down her back, breathing in the scent of green growing things. Just like she’d been doing that morning, until she heard a boom in the distance and caught the sudden acrid smell of smoke on the wind. Then she was running back, back to home, faster than she’d ever run before, on legs that burned already.

She kept running and she was on Elysium, dashing through the colony’s streets, trying to find her way to somewhere useful, a garrison, an armory, a police station, anything. She was in Brazil, running an obstacle course through the tropical humidity. She was on Therum, sprinting for her life, coughing out the stink of sulfur, as the mine collapsed behind her. She was on the Collector Base, going flat out, desperate to make that jump before the base blew or the Collectors caught up with her. She was on Tuchanka, dodging Reaper and thresher maw and krogan alike, because she had to get to the hammer, had to–

She ran and ran and kept running. Her surroundings changed, darkened, closed in, until she was running through London, running and running to the beam that seemed always so far away, running and she couldn’t spare a breath, a moment, to look over her shoulder and see if anyone was with her, running until suddenly it was there, before her, and she swept aside one last husk, and flung herself into the beam.

And then she screamed, as it burned, scorched the armor off her body, melted the skin and fat and muscle right off her bones, unmade her. She was nothing but bones and cybernetics and still she was screaming as she burned.

She woke up with a gasp, coated in sweat, and stared at the cracked ceiling above her head.


	35. Call me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-game. Miranda brings Shepard back. Again.

Somehow, seeing Shepard this way is worse than working on her frozen, battered corpse for two years. Maybe it’s that she has a pulse now, if weak and erratic. Maybe it’s the extent of the damage: armor ablated away, burns, wounds, breaks, blood loss. Maybe it’s the emotional attachment.

Miranda always knew emotional attachments were trouble.

Shepard’s heart stops _again_ , and they get it going _again_ , and this time she opens her eyes, wide and wild and glazed over. She makes a ragged noise that Miranda thinks was supposed to be a scream. “I told you to give her more sedative,” she says, irritated. They’ve brought her in as a “consultant,” but they seem unwilling to listen to the things she has to say about Shepard’s condition, about how to treat her, about how her body processes chemicals. “This is what happened last time.”

Even so, Miranda is still surprised when Shepard’s rolling eyes focus on her. She shouldn’t be that aware, even if she’s conscious. Her tongue darts out, runs over cracked lips, and she croaks, “M-Miranda?”

“Shepard.” She leans over her, investing her voice with all the authority she can. “Rest. It’s over. You’ll be all right.”

“Wh-” A scab on her lip tears open. “What are you doing here?”

“Restarting your cybernetics, which is what brought you out of the coma you’ve been in.” She glances up at the useless, pompous doctors, and adds sharply, “As I told you it would.”

She looks down again to see Shepard’s fingers twitch, but she can’t reach for Miranda with her arm in that state. “How long?”

“Not long. Twenty days. Don’t worry, Shepard, the war is over. Whatever you did up there, the Crucible fired and the Reapers ceased to function.”

Shepard’s eyes start to glaze over again as the drugs they injected into her IV line begin to take effect. “Where-” Her eyes flutter closed, then open again. “G-”

Miranda interrupts. “You need to rest now.” She holds her breath until the eyes shut. Then she blows out a sigh, and her lips draw tight together.

There’s no mystery about what Shepard was going to say. Miranda doesn’t want to have to tell her the _Normandy_ ’s missing. Selfishly, but also practically. Shepard’s physical state is too fragile for despair.

This is the trouble with emotional attachments.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Resuming my reposting of older fics previously posted to tumblr.


	36. Get me back home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post-war. Post-destroy.

In the weeks after the end of the Reaper war, Val Shepard slowly put herself back together. She did her physical therapy dutifully. She flinched when she looked in the mirror and saw a rough crescent of scar tissue under her right eye, gaunt cheeks, hair cut short because so much of it had burned to ash. She hadn’t worn her hair short in her entire life. Her doctors expressed surprise at the speed of her physical recovery, but she felt hollowed out and brittle, more of a Shepard-automaton than when she’d woken up on Lazarus Station.

The _Normandy_ was still missing.

A lot of ships had gone missing in the energy surge that had destroyed the Reapers and knocked out the relays. Ships were still checking in every few days, they said. She nodded and checked the rosters every day, but it was hard to summon up any genuine sense of hope.

She lay awake at night, counting off the things that might have gone wrong. Destroyed in transit, run into hostile territory, comms destroyed. Hackett had had no luck raising them on his QEC, and Anderson’s was buried somewhere in the ruins of London. She remembered what the Catalyst AI had told her, that she might destroy all synthetic life, and that was when she realized that it was her fault, that she’d killed EDI and thus undoubtedly killed her crew. Selfishly, she thought that she never should have called for that evac. That was the first night she cried.

After that, it seemed as though she couldn’t stop. The littlest thing might set her off into a slow, teary dissolving. She saw how Wrex glared at her and Miranda watched her with a worried frown, but she couldn’t bring herself to explain. She’d been prepared to die herself, but she hadn’t been prepared to lose Garrus, or the crew. She kept going through the motions, and the doctors kept making approving noises and suggesting that she might be cleared for duty in another month or so.

Yet she’d never felt so unmoored. So purposeless. Not when she’d been surrounded by Cerberus crew, too aware of her subtle confinement; not after they’d blown up the Collector Base, not after she’d decided to turn herself in to the Alliance. Each of those times, she’d at least had something to push her forward. Now the idea of going on alone made her heart pound and her breath come short and her eyes fill up with tears. Again. She just didn’t know if she could do it this time.

When Miranda and Kasumi and Jack and the others bundled her up and forced her to leave her spare prefab room, she assumed they were trying to cheer her up somehow. Maybe they’d found a cache of booze and would throw her a party or something, and she’d pretend to enjoy herself.

She didn’t expect to end up in front of a communication device. “What is this?” she asked faintly.

“It’s your QEC,” Kasumi said brightly. “We’ve been looking for it, but we didn’t want to tell you until we’d found it and gotten it working.”

“My QEC?” she said, stupidly, even as Kasumi gave her a patented shadowy grin, shooed the others out, and shut the door behind them, leaving her alone.

And then the QEC activated, and for the first time in weeks Shepard started crying without resenting it.


	37. Time (ME3)

“Okay,” Shepard said. “We dock at 1000. I need to go meet the councilors right after that, I need to check in with Bailey at 1230, and I’ve got a conference call with Alliance brass at 1600. So, I guess I might be free for dinner?” 

Garrus shook his head. “No good. I’ve got a vidcall with the remnants of my task force at your 1750, and a talk with Victus after.” 

Shepard frowned. “Okay, then, maybe I could give the councilors an excuse and meet you for lunch?” 

“Victus wants me in a meeting with them at 1200, and otherwise I’m coordinating with the refugees.” 

Shepard sighed. “Well, that’s disappointing.” 

“It’s not as if we’re going to eat the same food, anyway.” 

“That’s not the point,” she said with some force. “The point is to be able to sit down and have a relatively relaxed meal together, without casualty reports or vidcalls or a billion people asking for little favors.” Her voice got louder as she spoke, and she could feel her annoyance growing like a physical ache. She’d already gotten to the point where she dreaded coming back into the dock. Wasn’t that the opposite of how things were supposed to be? When the ship pulled out of dock, Shepard was going to guaranteed crises and combat missions. Shouldn’t she be fearing that? 

Instead, she loathed the idea of putting into dock, spending her hours in a swirl of meetings, interviews, countless errands or tasks that she couldn’t predict, surrounded by people who didn’t always understand how acute the situation actually was. Out in the black, the hours between missions at least had friendship and common cause. 

Garrus reached out and squeezed her arm, a brief touch that grounded her and pulled her back to this moment. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do. How about we rendezvous at the refugee camps around 1400?” 

She blinked and managed a wry smile. “Lunch with refugees?” 

“Hey, we could do worse. Some of them are crooks and all of them are desperate, but most of them aren’t politicians.” 

Shepard laughed and tapped his armored chest. “Look who’s talking.” 

“Oh, I’m absolutely not a politician.” 

“Except by necessity.” Her emotional equilibrium restored, she stretched up and kissed him on the mandible. “Okay. I’ll keep you posted, in case something else comes up.” 

“Likewise.” He nuzzled his face against hers briefly. 

EDI’s voice cut in. “Shepard, we dock in thirty minutes, and you have just received seven new messages.” Somehow her tone managed to convey apology without actually saying the words. 

Shepard sighed and straightened her shoulders. “Right, let’s go see what people want.”


	38. Nothing left to say (early ME3)

Sometimes there is nothing left to say. As they prepare to depart from Menae, Victus and his staff scrambling around packing up necessities and making preparations to leave his command behind, Shepard catches Garrus standing alone, staring at where Palaven burns in the sky. Even if, by some miracle, the Reapers all curled up and died this moment, the destruction they’ve already caused would raze Palaven’s atmosphere and landscape for decades, maybe centuries.

She hesitates before stepping up beside him and putting her hand on his shoulder. She squeezes, even knowing he won’t feel it through his armor.

It’s little enough comfort, with friends and relatives left behind, his homeworld in ruins. They don’t have time for much more, especially not with so many people around.

Garrus glances toward her, mandibles set tight to his jaw, and gives her the barest nod, acknowledging her presence. Taking some comfort from it, she hopes.

In the six months since she’s seen him, the wounds on his face have healed into ridges and whorls of scarred flesh. She wants to feel them with her fingertips. He also ditched his old blasted armor, thank goodness. The set he’s wearing now looks nearly new, heavy and high-quality, a striking silver and blue. She can’t help but notice that the armor sets off his natural coloring and deep blue markings, even in their current straits. She has a hundred questions — about the armor, about this whole “Reaper expert thing” — but now isn’t the time.

They’ll have time later, at least. They can catch up on the Normandy, once Victus and his people are settled. A few hours ago she wasn’t even sure Garrus was alive. She squeezes harder, taking comfort from the hard ceramic plating under her hand.

Looking at Palaven herself, Shepard remembers how Earth looked when she left it, only a couple of days ago: Reapers descending black and spider-like through the gossamer cloud cover, but the planet still blue and green and white, an oasis in the void of space, spangled with the lights of human cities and roads.

She wonders what it looks like now, and how long it will take before it’s as charred as Palaven.

As if he knows what she’s thinking, Garrus puts his hand on her shoulder and squeezes back. She only feels a bit of pressure through her armor, but even that is comforting. Having Garrus at her side, tall and solid, feels right, like shrugging on a favorite set of clothes, like gaining another limb.

Shepard isn’t arrogant enough to think she’s invincible, but with Garrus at her side, she feels a lot closer to it.

Looking to the side, she finds Garrus’s pale-blue gaze on her. She nods, and Garrus tilts his head. Without a word, they turn together and head toward the shuttle.


	39. Hold me (ME3, after Thessia)

Garrus found Shepard in the lowest levels of the _Normandy_ , in the little in-between cargo zone where Jack used to hole up. She sat with her head in both hands, her knuckles scraped and bruised, her elbows propped on her knees.

“Shepard,” he said, and hesitated, not sure what to say next.

“Are there any more disasters I should know about?” she asked. She sounded as flat and dispirited as he’d ever heard her.

“No,” he said.

“Just Thessia, then,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“And the fact that Cerberus keeps being one step ahead of us, somehow.” Her hands clenched. “How is our intel this _bad_? Helping Aria was supposed to give us a leg up.”

He had never thought helping Aria’s scheme was going to get them anywhere, but he kept that thought to himself. “Communications are shot pretty much everywhere.”

“I know,” she said. “Do you know what gets me, about Thessia?” She looked up. The paint around her eyes was smudged, the skin beneath bruised-looking.

“What?” Garrus asked, uneasy.

“The asari leadership have been sitting on their blue asses this whole war. I should be pissed at them. I _am_ pissed at them. But their ground troops — they had no idea. They acted like… I don’t know. Like one ground team was going to make the whole difference.” She shook her head, her shoulders drawing up. “They put their lives on the line to get us into their fucking temple, and it didn’t even get us anywhere.”

“I know,” Garrus said. More lives thrown away. At this point he’d have to say he was unimpressed with Asari Command.

“I am so…” Shepard’s voice wavered. She cleared her throat, swiping the back of her hand across her nose. “I’m only one person, Garrus.”

He knew that, too, and for a moment rage boiled up in his chest, at all the people who leaned on her now after ridiculing her for years, all the people who piled more and more weight on top of her and didn’t seem to care if she broke, even her own commanders. He swallowed, fighting to keep his voice level. “Shepard, how can I help?”

“You’re doing fine,” she said. She scrubbed both hands over her eyes briefly. “You should… keep on doing what you’re doing, with the Primarch, and everything.”

“I meant for you.”

She was silent for a moment, still bracing her head with both hands. “If you could just… hold me for a moment…”

“That I can do. Move over.”

She shifted over on the crate. He had to squeeze to fit into the cramped space beside her, but she leaned into him when he put his arm around her shoulders, so he pulled her closer, armor and all. She sighed and rested her head on his shoulder, as if that was comfortable.

He didn’t bother saying anything more. They’d both heard all the platitudes they needed. More platitudes than they needed. He just sat there and held her, surrounded by the hum of the drive core, which felt like quiet.


	40. Take my hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'd call this somewhere in ME2.

“Take my hand,” Shepard shouted from the top of the cliff.

Garrus, perched on the rocks below her position, stared up at her in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“You got a better idea?” she called back.

Barely balanced on a crumbling and narrow band of rock, he did not. If he fell off this cliff, he was going to blame Cerberus, or maybe the Blue Suns. He and Shepard and Tali had taken the shuttle down to the planet’s surface in search of a mercenary outpost that mysteriously wasn’t showing up on the _Normandy_ ’s sensors. The tracks they’d found had led along the edge of the cliff, which had looked a hell of a lot more stable than it actually was. Garrus found that out the hard way, when part of it crumbled beneath his feet, dumping him here.

“There’s got to be another way,” he said. “Maybe I could make my way along the ledge, or —”

“And risk falling again? No thanks,” Shepard said.

“We could call for the Hammerhead —”

“That patch of rock you’re standing on doesn’t look too stable,” Shepard said patiently. “It’ll take too long to get the Hammerhead down here.”

Great. She’d adopted the kind of tone she used for particularly ignorant or panicky civilians. Garrus wasn’t panicking. Much. She had reasonable points, but she was ignoring a crucial detail.

“Shepard,” he said, aggravated, “there is no way even you can pull up an adult turian in full armor.”

Mistake. Shepard grinned the way she did before hurling herself across a battlefield. Garrus’ gizzard clenched. “Is that a challenge, big guy?”

“ _No_ ,” he growled.

“Come on, you know Cerberus put in a little extra when they rebuilt me.” She held out her hand.

He could reach it, that wasn’t the problem. He eyed the cliff, searching for usable handholds. Maybe if he could help it along a little. He shifted, and a stream of small stones rained off the ledge near his feet.

Somewhere above, Tali squawked.

“Garrus,” Shepard said. “Come on, just take my hand.”

It was a terrible plan, but the rocks were still shifting under his feet, and he didn’t have another one.

He reached up and grabbed her hand.

He was fairly sure he could hear her shoulder popping from two arm’s-lengths away. Shepard’s face went white and tight. But she pulled, and she didn’t let go. He managed to find a toehold or two on the rock face, and between the two of them, he made it back up to the surface, immediately crawled away from the cliff face, and lay there, staring gratefully up at the sky.

Shepard, also sprawled on the ground, laughed. “Told you.”

“Did you dislocate your shoulder?” Garrus demanded.

“Again?” Tali put in.

“No, no, I’m good.”

Garrus sat up and cast a skeptical look at Shepard. Her arm didn’t _look_ out of place, at least, but she had the opposite hand pressed to her shoulder. “It’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll maybe go see Chakwas when we get back.”

“Do that,” Garrus said.

She sat up and smiled back at him. “I wasn’t going to let you fall, though.”

Of course she wasn’t. His heart fluttered. “I know, Shepard.”

“Can we _please_ go back to the _Normandy_ now?” Tali demanded.

“Sure, Tali,” Shepard and Garrus said simultaneously.

Tali groaned and stalked back toward the shuttle.


	41. Imitation

“Is that supposed to sound like me?”

Someone like Shepard, who normally took up a lot of space and attention in any room she was in, really had no right being so damned quiet when she chose.

Vega coughed as her gimlet gaze traveled around the _Normandy_ ’s galley. He was the one who’d been caught in the act, mimicking Shepard giving a pep talk to a baby marine while forcing his voice two octaves above its normal range. Vega was also the one who’d started this whole thing, so Garrus didn’t feel too bad for him.

The moment Shepard’s eyes turned toward him, though, Garrus stiffened, wondering exactly how long she’d been standing there before she said anything, and what exactly he’d said in the last ten minutes.

Was that when he’d been imitating her recruiting people for the Omega-4 mission? _Ignore Cerberus. I’m not with Cerberus. You wanna face down the Collectors? Come with me. I should go._

Yeah, yeah it was. She’d probably heard that.

“Because that was a pretty poor imitation,” she said. Her arms hung loose and easy at her sides. Deceptive.

Vega coughed again and said, “Hey, L- Commander, just having a little fun. No big deal, right?”

“Sure,” she drawled, not setting anyone at ease.

“Y’know, uh, no offense or anything.”

Garrus added, “It’s just that you’re such an inspiration to all of us, Shepard.”

Her eyebrows twitched. “Oh, I see.”

“You know, like how that Shepard VI boosts people’s morale.”

Her lips twitched, too. “Right. Well. Glad I make such an impression on people.”

“Right,” Vega said. “Listen, I was supposed to meet Esteban down in the bay, so I’m just gonna…” He made his escape without finishing his sentence, leaving Garrus to face down Shepard by himself.

“That was a lousy imitation,” she told him.

The corners of her mouth were definitely twitching, so he wasn’t worried. “Come on, Shepard, it was funny.”

“I don’t sound like that. I’ve never sounded like that.”

“Uh-huh.”

She drew herself up and crossed her arms, dropping her voice into a lower register. “Did I ever tell you I was a big deal on Omega? Yeah. Name’s Archangel. Remind me to tell you about the time I dropped three mercs with one shot sometime.”

Her voice sounded flat, no subharmonics, but he recognized the mimicry: “Low blow, Shepard.”

She smirked. “Oh, you can dish it out but you can’t take it, Garrus?”

He would take whatever amount of mockery she wanted as long as it kept her smiling, honestly. He grinned back at her.

Her expression went softer, like she’d read his mind. She tilted her head toward the elevator. “You wanna --?”

“Yeah,” he said, his fingers itching to take her hair down. “Definitely.”

“ _Definitely_ ,” she echoed, trying to imitate him again.

He flicked his mandibles. “Really?”

“You say that all the time.” She started walking backward toward the elevator.

“I can’t possibly say that all the time.”

“ _I definitely have some calibrations to do._ ”

“Oh, come on, Shepard,” he said, but he followed her laughter all the way back to her quarters.


End file.
